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British Beagle to sniff out life on Mars

A SPACE probe built in Britain has arrived in Kazakhstan on the first leg of a journey to Mars where it will seek signs of life.

Engineers will soon begin loading the Beagle 2 Mars lander onto a Soyuz rocket to be launched late next month. It is the most high-profile element of Mars Express, a £100m European Space Agency mission to be formally unveiled this week.

Beagle 2 was built by scientists from the Open University in Milton Keynes. They had to raise most of the estimated cost of more than £10m as they were building it.

Funders include the Department of Trade and Industry and the Wellcome Trust.

If it reaches Mars and its instruments work it should be able to tell whether life ever existed there. If evidence is found on a planet as arid and hostile as Mars, some researchers believe, life could exist all over